Intel Moon Lake Leak Points To Dirt-Cheap 6W Chips Built On 18A

Are you familiar with Intel's low-power Wildcat Lake processor platform? We've reviewed a few machines powered by Wildcat Lake, including the Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 3i and Dell's XPS 13. It's an itty bitty processor with just two P-cores and four LP E-cores as well as just one or two Xe3-cores for graphics. Obviously, it's meant for micro machines and affordable laptops, but maybe not the most affordable laptops. That job might fall to "Moon Lake," which is apparently Wildcat Lake without the P-cores.

This information comes from regular and reasonably reliable Intel leaker Jaykihn (@Jaykihn0 on Xwitter) who has delivered all kinds of Intel specifications over the past couple of years since he became active. In the same leak, he not only posits the existence of Moon Lake, but also confirms that Wildcat Lake Refresh will have the same core configuration as Lunar Lake, with four P-cores and four LP E-cores, making the "Refresh" nomenclature rather curious given that the extant Wildcat Lake processors (the Core 300 series) top out at 2 P-cores.


Answering questions in the comments, Jaykihn explained that the LP E-cores on Moon Lake are the same Darkmont architecture as the E-cores in Panther Lake and Wildcat Lake, and that the chip is designed for a 6 watt power envelope, although it can apparently be configured between 6 and 15 watts. Notably, it's fabricated on 18A, so these aren't junk chips made on a legacy fabrication process. They might be recovered Wildcat Lake silicon, though.

Either way, you can probably expect the same limitations of a 64-bit memory bus and a maximum of two Xe3-cores, although we wouldn't be surprised if Moon Lake exclusively comes with a single Xe3-core for graphics. In that way, these chips are the successors to the Alder Lake-N and Twin Lake families of E-cores-only CPUs, although those parts scaled up to eight CPU cores. It'll be fascinating to see how much Wildcat Lake-R chips cost; VideoCardz is reporting that they will make up the Core 7 and Core 5 Series 4 families.

As for Moon Lake, it's a seriously small chip. Given the low TDP, it could easily find its way into tablets and other extremely thin form factors. Honestly it's quite something when a quad-core, multi-GHz x86-64 processor with more than a TFLOP of compute can fit under just a six-watt TDP. 18A is really something. These chips should arrive after Nova Lake, but likely before Razor Lake, sometime next year.